How do we make sense of the world? The present moment has never happened before. It is unprecedented. Do we experience it that way, open to its infinite possibilities?

Of course not. We'd be dead. Each person who is mauled by a grizzly bear experiences something subtly different from the previous maulee, but natural selection has blinded us to that infinite variety for our own good. We see a grizzly, remember a past mauling, and decide against antagonizing it.

And so it is with pundits and politicians. If the pundit is continually open to the human uniqueness of every politician, he will never complete this week's 800 words. A talking head must talk, and so he imagines that politician y will behave today as politician x behaved last year, and then spins that analogy into a prediction about tomorrow.

The confounding thing about Donald J. Trump isn't that he is hard to understand. He is very easy to understand. He is an insecure little bully who desperately wants to be loved by his father. With dad being dead, he craves the love and attention of celebrities, strangers, the in-crowd, whomever... as long as it can be measured and felt by him. He is utterly hollow, devoid of substance, character, and basic history to the extent that he has never heard of John Lewis or Frederick Douglass.

No, the confounding thing about Donald Trump is that never in the history of the United States has a national politician been so empty, petty, and impulsive. Pundits and talking heads keep analogizing him to some previous experience, keep thinking this time he'll do that thing they always do, and then he doesn't and they say, well, he breaks all the rules.

Trump cedes authority. I rarely see this possibility discussed, but it has several historical precedents among presidents who found the job mentally or physically overwhelming. The key aspect is that within a year or two, Trump would have effectively relinquished day-to-day control of the government to Vice President Mike Pence and to his Cabinet, instead focusing on the more ceremonial aspects of the presidency and perhaps exploiting it for personal enrichment. There are several variations on this scenario, which range from Trump being surprisingly popular as a sort of celebrity-in-chief to Trump largely withdrawing from the public spotlight.

Chief White House strategist Steve Bannon tried to order Department of Homeland Security secretary John Kelly to not issue a waiver exempting green card holders from President Trump’s travel ban executive order, according to a new report in the Washington Post. Per two Trump administration officials who spoke with the Post’s Josh Rogin, Kelly ultimately rebuffed the attempt, telling Bannon that he only takes orders from the president. The president never weighed in, and Kelly went ahead and issued the waiver, which was made public on Sunday night. That waiver ended two full days of confusion and chaos around the question of whether or not permanent U.S. residents from the seven predominantly Muslim nations included in the ban would be allowed to reenter the country. The White House itself then confirmed that green card holders were exempt from the order on Tuesday.

These are the facts of Trump. He has no interest in running the administration. He has no interest in learning about policy. He has no ability to think strategically. He will absolutely delegate all these things to trusted advisors. But he will never, ever tolerate the suggestion that he is not in charge, that he does not understand the policy, or that he is not thinking strategically. Yet, for Bannon to take over as shadow president, he must be able to speak for the president and have people believe him. He must be able to commit the president to doing things and know that the president will do those things.

In short, for Bannon or Kushner or Pribus or Pence to run the show, Trump must be willing to stop being Trump. It'll never happen.

...Whenever the media analyses itself, you can always feel the competition between an earnest desire to understand the world and outcome based reasoning. The outcome they need to arrive at follows from their view that democracy depends not just on a free press, but on the very peculiar kind of free press that developed in the decades after World War II.

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One of the many, many things I love about this piece is that Brian Beutler never once uses the left-right spectrum metaphor. In fact, he outright rejects it and replaces it with a DARWINIAN METAPHOR!!!! I am so happy!

This wasn't a big problem when a high school diploma qualified students for a career. But today, when post-secondary education is essential to secure employment, our system of providing it is separate but equal. If you didn't go to college, you still pay state taxes and fund State U, but your kids won't go there. Instead, they are left to fend for themselves in the jungle of trade schools, community colleges, and for-profits.

That's how these people learn to act. They get it from their peers. They don't have morals or a sense of justice, not like most Americans I know. You can call me prejudiced, but I've known too many of them.

A superior metaphor for politics is a tubing trip on a river. We lash our inner-tubes to the tubes of other members of our tribe, people who share our interests and our identity, people with whom we would happily share our beer. Which is why one of the tubes holds a trash-can cooler full of ice and beer, but no one really keeps track of who bought the beer and who bought the ice as everyone drinks according to their thirst. But "the communal beer" is only communally shared with the folks lashed into our raft.